Climate Change: Day 23

December 2, 2014

  • Exam 3: This Thursday, December 4th.

  • Term project due date: Wednesday, December 10th. Email your HTML file to jelsner@fsu.edu.

  • Office hours: Today, 2-3p, Thursday, 9-10:45a, 2-3p. Next Monday 9-10:45a, 1-3p, next Tuesday 9a-3p.

  • Last time: Are there more tornadoes today? No, but…

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Do lakes protect you from tornadoes?

Problem

  • Locally your chance of getting hit by a tornado is small. About .1% per year in tornado alley.
  • With only 50 years of tornado data, local statistics are not reliable.

Solution

  • Aggregate the data (EF1+ 1954-2013, Kansas by county)

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Sample Questions

Violent tornadoes have winds exceeding

  • 30 m/s
  • 43 m/s
  • 65 m/s
  • 73 m/s
  • 100 m/s

Another name for a rotating thunderstorm is a

  • supercell
  • superstorm
  • tornado
  • tornado vortex
  • none of the above

Tornado intensity is most reliably estimated from

  • damage surveys
  • anemometers
  • satellites
  • rainrates
  • none of the above

According to the research by professor Elsner, the most energetic tornado year since 1994 was

  • 1996
  • 1999
  • 2005
  • 2011
  • 2013

The abbreviation RFD stands for

  • rear frontal divergence
  • rear flank downdraft
  • right frontal dewpoints
  • right flank dynamics
  • none of the above

Instructor evaluation

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